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Google Voice makes a triumphant return to webOS with Voogle

Nathan Mylott — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:26:52 +0000

Google Voice has returned to webOS with a brand new app that lets you call and text from your Google Voice number right on your phone just like the good old days.

Voogle has hit the official App Catalog, and it has an interface that is almost exactly like the native webOS messaging app and dial pad. You should feel right at home transitioning to this as your communications method of choice. It will even replace your carrier voicemail with Google voicemail. Setting it up could not be easier as it walks you through a couple quick steps to set up as soon as you launch the app.

Aside from the typical calling and texting from within the app, you will also be able to listen to your voicemail and recorded calls, and read voicemail transcripts. There are folders for starred messages, missed calls and dialed calls, received calls and more. In short, everything in your Google Voice account.

This is not all either. There are more features to come including mutlimedia messaging and real time notifications. Plus, according to the developer, "Voogle also supports cross-app launching so pretty soon some of your other favorite apps can start utilizing the power of Voogle."

Get it right now for $1.99 in the App Catalog.

Google News update actually includes webOS this time

Nathan Mylott — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 14:17:03 +0000

In what is hopefully a turning point in Google's attitude toward webOS, they have finally included the best mobile OS in one of their products; an update to the functionality of Google News for mobile.

The update is enabled for IOS and Android devices as well and makes the interface much easier for your fingers. In the list of articles, the entire text of the preview is now clickable, not just the headline. So it is much easier to click the article you want to read.

There is also now a 'more sources' link that will take you to more articles about the same topic. It is sort of redundant in the screenshot above because I searched for webOS and clicking more sources just takes me to more webOS articles that are already in the list. So this feature is only useful if you are browsing the day's headlines, not necessarily searching for something in particular it seems.

This is quite a surprise since Google has left webOS out of nearly all of its new product and feature launches, most recently Google Instant. It did, however, enable Google Suggest on webOS devices, so their standpoint on supporting the OS is confusing.

Source: Download Squad; Via: WebOS Roundup

Google Instant now on mobile; webOS left out again

Nathan Mylott — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:28:12 +0000

It looks like Google will continue its long history of "forgetting" about the existence of webOS by enabling Google Instant on Android and iOS 4 devices (only in Safari) but not webOS. The new feature can be turned on with a link on those devices... a link that is nowhere to be found anywhere on the Google page or in the settings page when you open it on your webOS device.

For those of you not familiar with Google Instant, Google display results for you as you are typing. As if scouring the web with the press of the enter key was not fast enough, now you do not even have to type your whole search query before seeing results.

On the bright side, we suppose, Google Instant is practically useless on an iOS device, because as you can see in the image above, you cannot see any of the instant results until you get rid of the keyboard. Therefore you end up with the same number of clicks you had before. I suspect the result would be the same on any device with an on screen keyboard, although it does look pretty slick in Google's demo, which you can watch after the break.

Google Suggest does work on webOS devices and has for several months now. When I tested Google on my Pre, it remembered my search history from my computer. It had search queries in the list that I had just searched on my computer only a couple minutes before.

Because we have Universal Search, and Google Suggest works so well on webOS (and it's integrated into Just Type in webOS 2.0), it seems the webOS community is not missing much. Still, let us hope that at some point in the future, Google will stop snubbing its customers who use devices that Google deems unworthy.

Source: Google; Via: Engadget

Linking Contacts

Adam Marks — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:04:31 +0000

One of the beauties of Synergy is that webOS can take multiple entries for the same person in your contact list (regardless if the entry is from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, or your Palm Profile) and merge them all together so you don’t need to worry about finding the one right entry that has the email address or phone number you need. While webOS will automatically merge contacts based on a formula that looks for the same Name, email address or phone number, it doesn't always work perfectly. For example, webOS may not realize that "Jon Smith" and "Jonathan Smith" are the same person, or wouldn't know that "Jane Jones" and "Mom" should be linked together. In other cases, the way that different accounts handle middle or maiden names may cause a problem. In these situations, you may need to manually link those contacts together. Continue ready past the break to learn how

Type to search in the browser

Adam Marks — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:02:25 +0000

While you can perform a quick search of Google or Wikipedia directly from Universal Search, the web browser has a mini-version of Universal Search built in that allows for a similar action. From anywhere on a website within the browser card, you can just start typing on the keyboard to bring up a search bar on the top of the screen. There are 4 search options that you can take advantage of once you start typing:

If you enter in an actual web address URL and press either the Enter key () or the Arrow icon () on the screen, the browser will load up that website.
If you enter a search term (as opposed to a URL), you can either press the Enter key () or you can tap on the top row labeled "Google" to initiate a Google Search.
If you tap on the Wikipedia row, you will initiate a search of the mobile Wikipedia site
In the final area, you will see any of your browser bookmarks followed by your browser viewing history that matches against your search. You will see any website with that search in the URL address or website name, sorted in the order of the most recently visited site. You can drag the search menu up to reveal additional history items

Rubinstein ranked #41 in T3 Tech 100

Robert Knight — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:07:10 +0000

Jon Rubinstein, the leader of Palm, now a unit of HP (with Rubenstein serving as a Senior Vice President) is listed as number 41 in the 2010 Tech 100 list by T3.com. Last year Rubinstein was ranked at 17th, but due to the Pre not selling as well as had been expected, plus the fact that Palm barely stayed alive long enough to be snapped up by HP, meant that Rubinstein’s ranking suffered accordingly. That said, it doesn't mean that Mr. Rubinstein can't rebound next year. Palm is in position with HP to make waves in the technology world, with the PalmPad and new smartphones due early next year, plus webOS 2.0 and a variety of other devices on the way.

Rubenstein was ranked ahead of a number of well-known tech names, including Kevin Rose of Digg (#80), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (#59), Michael Dell (#54), and Apple designer Jonathan Ive (#50). There was also only one other HP employee on the list, CFO and interim CEO (at least until Léo Apotheker takes over on a more permanent basis) Catherine Lesjak at ninety-six on the roster. Unsurprisingly, the list was led by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, followed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt sharing third-position with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Source: T3.com

HP’s eStation AiO: Yahoo-skinned Android-power tablet-printer combo

Derek Kessler — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:27:59 +0000

Prior to snapping up Palm, HP was very intently studying the tablet space. It was obvious that a Windows 7 tablet was in the cards (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed one off at CES), but whether they were working on something else wasn’t clear. Rumors and leaks and blurry cam photos soon surfaced of an Android-powered tablet and printer combo code-named the Zeus (or Zeen (or c510)).

HP’s finally gotten around to announcing this fantastical mystery device, and it’s called the HP Photosmart eStation AiO. AiO stands for all-in-one (as in printer/fax/scanner/copier), but the tablet is obviously the interesting part of this combination: it runs Android 2.1, but it’s nowhere near the typical Android experience. Instead this sucker’s been heavily skinned and locked down with the help of Yahoo (yes, Yahoo tinkering with Google’s OS on HP’s printer), leaving users with a host of Yahoo widgets and a handful of HP ePrint apps, plus email and browser and a Nook eReader app.

This ain’t no Google experience, but signs right now indicate that it’s not what we should expect from webOS and Palm under HP. Despite its Android roots, the eStation AiO is a dedicated device. It’s not a tablet computer by any means: it’s more a super-advanced control interface for a printer with some on-the-go on the side. Which is kind of, uh, interesting? Let’s just hope that this isn’t what HP has in mind for their webOS printer idea too.

Source: Engadget; Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

Google launches Chrome to Phone, we’d love to see it on webOS

Robert Werlinger — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:23:21 +0000

Google announced at its annual I/O event back in May that it was going to bring a new extension to Chrome and an app to Android Market that would enable users to send maps, articles and videos directly to your phone with the single click of an icon that lives in the Chrome toolbar. The Chrome extension has been available for some time now, and Google officially made the Android app available today.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the ReadWriteWeb opines, this feature should be on every phone, and I'm inclined to agree. It seems given how powerful extensions are in Chrome and Firefox, and how easy it would be to develop an app in webOS that could communicate with said extension, that an enterprising developer could make an extension/app combo that replicates the functionality of Chrome to Phone.

I could very well be wrong about jut how easy it would be to bring this to webOS of course, what with my not actually being a developer and all, but the usage cases for this technology are vast. I'd imagine that the first dev to bring a compelling product like this to market in the App Catalog could very well gain some significant notoriety.

Hit the break of a video overview of the technology.

Via: ReadWriteWeb, Android Central; Source: Google's Mobile Blog

Why open source doesn’t always mean open on smartphones [OSCON2010]

Robert Werlinger — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:57:37 +0000

I caught an excellent presentation by Aaron Williamson from the Software Freedom Law center here at OSCON yesterday examining why smartphones built on open source software aren’t as open as they possibly could be. What Williams talked about was often eye opening, though there were a few points I found myself disagreeing with him on.

Bing mobile search works great on webOS (video)

Robert Werlinger — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:13:21 +0000

It's been awhile since I've used Bing mobile search, primarily because of Google's integration into universal search. I fired Bing up earlier today after that long hiatus, and I have to say that I'm rather impressed with what Microsoft has done with the mobile implementation of its search engine.

It's clear that it isn't yet 100% optimized for webOS as the on-screen navigation buttons can sometimes obscure navigation links and the maps portion is somewhat broken, but there's still a lot to like. I enjoy the simpler results page in Bing - Google's has become rather bloated in my opinion, and I find myself rarely using most of the stuff they've added over the last few months - and I enjoy what I feel is a superior image search implementation, and the Local, Movies, and Weather sections all seem to be on par with Google's offering. I dig Bing, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm ready to make the switch. Yet.

Speaking of making the switch, adding Bing to Universal Search can be a bit of a challenge unless you're a Verizon Pre or Pixi user, in which case you got the ability to change your default search provider back when 1.4.1 hit. The rest of us have to add providers to Universal Search by way of Homebrew and patching (the patch enabling you to configure search providers in Universal Search is easily found in Preware).

Catch the video of Bing action after the break.